Perfect is the Enemy of Good

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A person with a heavy and/or academic pre-ordained framework might not be qualified to assess the value of something outside their area of specialty, certainly if their specialty has been surrounded with layers of air conditioned well padded ivory tower insulation.

A local art critic /art consultant/operative doesn't review an art show but vents spleen with hostile biased invective, doesn't bother to notice difference between black and white.

Maybe with so much agenda, not really looking.

Jasper Johns famously depicted the critic seeing with mouth, in this case in order to retch...

As she promotes competing local art dealers on her web site, I am not convinced of her objectivity, something occasionally valued in the art business.

Also bizarre to contrast the Barnes Foundation with a small independent non-commercial gallery for contrast and as proof of claims. The Barnes is a place with a much higher budget and also a place that notoriously DID NOT LABEL THE ART .

This was based on Barnes' decision to prioritize engaging with art more than calculating at the art.

"Barnes wished to emphasize the aesthetic qualities of art—the emotional coefficients of line, form, color, texture, and so on. This led him to arrange his collection unchronologically in tableaux designed to highlight the aesthetic, rather than the narrative or thematic, affinities among the works. Many visitors to the Foundation have found this—and the absence of wall labels identifying the works—off-putting. But such were Barnes’s strategies to coax students (and visitors) into looking. Simple chronological organization and wall labels—to say nothing of that contemporary bane, the “audio tour”—serve to distract the viewer from, well, viewing. They encourage him to substitute reading or listening for the harder work of attentive scrutiny."

Using the Star for half baked opinion about a small easy target gallery -absolutely unfortunate for the artists that could've used a real commitment to observation. A real commitment to "the harder work of attentive scrutiny" .

Using the Star to pose as an academic without doing the work of researching citations, in a cow town where the experts love to ride herd based on their "credentials", absolutely unfortunate for the people that live here.

Also a number of misattributions of color and tone in the article are further indications her vision clouded if not spurious. I requested a correction from the Star and that was published 02-26-2013 on page A3. The Star only updated the review online, doesn't acknowledge changes.

Absolutely triple ironic to get in a bunch about respect and service, as if bureaucratic accoutrements are more value than the art, as if having the owner of the gallery in the room is less of a value than the dealers that have interns there to answer your questions while they sit in the office..

All from the perspective of a perfectionist with a budget and an agenda, how is this any real service to art here?

Art consultants love to leverage power and one of the ways they do that is by servicing.